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00:00In the eye of a violent storm, two lovers lie side by side.
00:17Around them, a furious sea rages.
00:21The woman sleeps peacefully.
00:24The man is awake, but tense.
00:31Nothing really can prepare you for the impact of this painting.
00:36It seems to get you in the grip of some extraordinary feeling that seems to overtake you.
00:47This picture is called The Tempest, and it was painted by Oskar Kokoschka in Vienna nearly
00:52100 years ago.
00:54Today, it's acknowledged as one of the great expressionist paintings of the 20th century.
01:00Everything, the brushwork, the composition, above all the colours, make you think that
01:08this is a picture about highly charged emotion.
01:13It's about much more than meets the eye.
01:20The story behind this painting is of a passionate, intense, wild and bizarre love affair between
01:27the rebellious, impoverished artist who painted it and a wealthy, older woman.
01:34The emotions they felt for each other were the affair's downfall.
01:38They were too strong and too destructive, I think.
01:42It was a very destructive affair on both sides.
02:12The Tempest is one of the prized possessions of the Kunstmuseum in the Swiss city of Basel.
02:23It's a large painting, nearly two metres high and over two metres wide, and it's strategically
02:29placed glimpsed through a long line of open doorways.
02:35The woman in the painting is Alma Mahler, one of the leading figures in Viennese high
02:40society at the turn of the 20th century.
02:45In later life, Oskar Kokoschka said,
02:49The Tempest showed me with a woman I once loved so intensely, in a shipwreck in mid-ocean.
03:01Oskar Kokoschka was born in 1886 and grew up in Fan de Siècle of Vienna.
03:08At the time, the city was one of the most vibrant artistic and cultural centres in Europe.
03:13It was home to artists like Gustav Klimt, musicians like Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav
03:18Mahler, and the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
03:27Oskar Kokoschka studied at the city's School for Applied Arts and soon established himself
03:32as one of the most exciting and innovative young artists of his generation.
03:40Oskar Kokoschka had a rather high reputation in the avant-garde circles and established
03:48a reputation as a rather uncompromising artist who established a language of his own in artistic
03:57terms.
04:01Hand in hand with Kokoschka's undoubted talent as an artist went a fierce, rebellious streak.
04:07In one defiant gesture, he shaved off his hair to Kokosnuk at Viennese bourgeois society.
04:14Kokoschka is an angry young man at that time and he tries to be an imposing person, judging
04:22from the photographs you can see at that time.
04:25Sometimes he appears as a very elegant person and it doesn't really fit with shaving his
04:31head at the same time, so it's a mixture of a dandy maybe and a skinhead.
04:41Kokoschka's reputation as a Viennese skinhead even reached the ears of the Archduke Franz
04:46Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
04:50He announced that he wanted to break every bone in Kokoschka's body, seeing him as a
04:54dangerous rebel trying to undermine the established order and the bourgeois culture of the time.
05:10This Viennese bourgeois society was Alma Mahler's home turf.
05:15She was a charismatic young woman and something of a celebrity.
05:21She was the eternal feminine.
05:23She was the most feminine, soft, beautiful person who was able to give men of great talent
05:34the feeling that she knew them down to the very core of their souls.
05:40On top of that, she could create an electric shock across a crowded room if she looked
05:45at a man.
05:47She was a compulsive flirt.
05:49She simply couldn't help it.
05:53Young Alma's introduction to the pleasures of the flesh began when she was kissed by
05:57Vienna's greatest artist of the time, Gustav Klimt.
06:02She was warned off the notorious womanizer for the very good reason that he probably
06:06had syphilis.
06:09But Alma was never short of admirers, and at the age of 22, she married the celebrated
06:15composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, 20 years her senior and the first of her three husbands.
06:26She did draw men really like a magnet.
06:29Even when she was married to Mahler, she had, well, at least one affair with the architect
06:36Walter Gropius, so much so that Mahler, who found out about this at a certain point, sought
06:43the advice and no doubt consolation from no one, none other than Sigmund Freud.
06:52In the 1960s, Alma's adventurous love life was celebrated in a ditty by the American
06:58songwriter Tom Lehrer.
07:01The loveliest girl in Vienna was Alma the smartest as well.
07:08Once you picked her up on your antenna, you'd never be free of her spell.
07:14Her lovers were many and varied from the day she began her bigeen.
07:21There were three famous ones whom she married, and God knows how many between.
07:29Oskar Kokoschka was, in Tom Lehrer's words, one of the men between.
07:35He and Alma first met less than a year after Gustav Mahler's premature death in 1911.
07:44As he approached this house in a suburb of Vienna on the evening of the 12th of April
07:491912, the young Oskar Kokoschka could not have known that within a few hours his life
07:55would be turned upside down.
07:59It was here that Oskar and Alma were introduced.
08:03She was intrigued and to break the ice, she asked if he'd like her to play the piano for
08:10him and she sat down at the piano and played Wagner's Liebestod.
08:18And Kokoschka was instantly struck.
08:30While she seduced him with her playing of Liebestod from Richard Wagner's opera Tristan
08:35and Isolde, Kokoschka made a little sketch of her.
08:41The affair started almost instantaneously.
08:44It was quite unusual, I think, even for Alma to be so...
08:49I think they were lovers within three or four days.
08:54It was a white-hot attraction.
09:00At first sight, Oskar and Alma must have seemed an odd couple.
09:05Even Kokoschka acknowledged their differences when he wrote,
09:08I was an immature youth with a tendency to run full tilt at brick walls, and she a woman
09:14of thirty, accustomed to luxury and always surrounded by men.
09:26Their affair was to last for three years and during that time, Kokoschka made hundreds
09:30of drawings and several paintings featuring his lover.
09:35He wrote over 400 love letters and was desperate to marry Alma.
09:40But he was also an intensely jealous man.
09:44When she went to the opera or to the concert and to meet friends and so on, he was always
09:51jealous.
09:52There's a nice story.
09:54He went away from her house in the middle of the night and he didn't go home.
10:00He stood in the garden before the house and waited that nobody comes in because he was
10:06jealous, who comes after me?
10:10His jealousy was a horror for her and he didn't trust in her.
10:15Maybe he was right, I don't know.
10:22And then Alma fell pregnant.
10:28Kokoschka could not have been happier, but she had other ideas.
10:33She checked into a sanatorium and had an abortion.
10:39This says a lot about the way in which he viewed the relationship and I don't think
10:45that he ever forgot it or forgave her entirely.
10:48There's no sign, however, that at the time it fatally damaged the relationship.
10:57But there were happier times.
11:06In the spring of 1913, Alma and Oskar travelled to Italy, ending up in Naples.
11:12They stayed in a hotel overlooking the bay and Mount Vesuvius.
11:16And while they were there, a significant event took place.
11:27The lovers were caught up in a violent storm and took shelter in a grounded boat lying
11:32near the seashore.
11:37The memory of protecting the vulnerable Alma must have lodged in Kokoschka's mind.
11:54The holiday over and back in Vienna, Alma made a dramatic offer to her lover.
12:00If you paint a great masterpiece, I will marry you, she said.
12:06Oskar took up the challenge with the intention of creating a painting that would stand forever
12:10as a symbol of his intense love for Alma.
12:18Kokoschka began work on The Tempest in April 1913.
12:22It would be his biggest painting to date.
12:25He shut himself away in this building in Vienna and, to put himself in the right mood, he
12:30took the extraordinary step of painting the walls of his studio black.
12:37Alma found this, and her lover's strange mood, extremely disturbing.
12:43She decided it would be better if she didn't see him quite so often.
12:56Looking closely at the broad brushstrokes and the thick layers of paint in The Tempest,
13:01it's easy to imagine the intensity with which Kokoschka worked away, alone in his gloomy
13:05studio.
13:07It's as if he's pouring all his highly charged feelings onto the canvas.
13:18At first it seems to be just a mass of flailing brushstrokes, and you're very aware of the
13:24paint and of the movement of Kokoschka's hands and of the marks that he makes in this
13:31very emphatic, violent way, all over the canvas.
13:36He lets the paint have an extraordinary life of its own in the middle of what is, after
13:41all, a pretty ferocious picture that seems as if it's been painted at full tilt.
13:52Something happened as Kokoschka worked on the painting.
13:55It seems that his feelings about the relationship with Alma began to change, and to reflect
14:00this, so did the painting.
14:04In his preparatory drawing, we see two lovers close together, and Kokoschka wrote about
14:09his work in progress,
14:11We look very strong and calm in our expressions, holding each other's hands.
14:18But in the final painting, the lovers are apart and they are not holding hands.
14:27And early on, the Tempest was referred to as the red painting.
14:33The Tempest certainly changed in terms of its colouring, to start with.
14:41And if you stand in front of the picture, you see glimpses of this strong, heavy red
14:47that originally was characteristic of the whole composition.
14:52Red of course, as a colour, has the connotation of passion, of love, of strength, of life.
15:02The change from this red to blue reflects a change of Kokoschka's attitude towards Alma.
15:12And perhaps he came to realise that his fancies would not come true.
15:19Perhaps he didn't want to realise it at that time, but he could not help expressing this
15:25foreboding of drifting apart.
15:29It is an intimate picture, but on the other hand, it is a picture full of distance.
15:45It's not really, you have not the feeling they had sex before.
15:50I think it is the beginning of the end of the love affair, and it is full of sadness.
15:55It's a sad picture, and it's a beautiful picture.
15:59Even the way Kokoschka has painted the two lovers suggests a separation.
16:10There is an enormous tension within his body.
16:14The body is full of tension.
16:18You realise it by the very, very different brushwork in which his body and her body are
16:25carried out.
16:29His body is made up of short, but very, very energetic strokes.
16:36Her body is smooth, painted in an almost classical manner, shimmering, luminous, and his body
16:46is trying to convey this feeling of pain, of failure, desperation, isolation, almost
16:56a corpse.
17:02But despite Kokoschka's use of cold blue and green, and the tension in the picture, for
17:08Alma, the tempest was still a romantic, tender image.
17:13He wrote, he painted me lying trustingly against him in the midst of a storm and huge
17:19waves, relying utterly on him for help, while he, tyrannical in his expression and radiating
17:26energy, calms the waves.
17:40When you look at the painting, you realise that it's very ambiguous, because on the one
17:47hand he does look as if he's a suffering victim, but he could almost be seen, I think, as the
17:53guardian of the woman, and that she has every reason to feel grateful that he is confronting
18:00the full brunt of this tempest that's raging around them, and that he's going to make sure
18:07that that's the way it stays.
18:32Kokoschka's original intention was to call the painting Tristan and Isolde, after the
18:37lovers in Richard Wagner's opera, a favourite of Alma's.
18:42The change of name came about when the poet Georg Trachl visited Kokoschka's studio.
18:47He was so inspired by what he saw that he composed a poem on the spot, and in the poem
18:53he used the word Winsprout.
18:57The Winsprout is a terrifically evocative, very lyrical German word, I mean normally
19:01one wouldn't use it to say tempest.
19:04Literally it means bride of the wind, which suits this particular image like a glove, of course.
19:18Kokoschka finished The Tempest in December 1913, and he described it as my strongest
19:24and most important work, the masterpiece of all expressionist striving.
19:32But it was not enough to win Alma's hand in marriage.
19:36Like the two lovers on canvas, Alma and Oskar began to drift apart.
19:47Just a few months after Kokoschka completed The Tempest, the man who had wanted to break
19:52every bone in his body, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was shot dead in Sarajevo, and
19:59Europe was at war.
20:07Kokoschka volunteered to fight, and enlisted in an exclusive regiment of dragoons.
20:11But he had a problem.
20:13He needed to provide his own horse, and he had just one asset that would raise the money,
20:19the tempest.
20:20He sold it to a Hamburg pharmacist called Otto Winter.
20:29And so The Tempest went off to Germany, Oskar and his horse went off to war, and Alma changed
20:36partners again, and went off to marry her former lover, Walter Gropius.
20:46Kokoschka was lucky to escape the war with his life.
20:49He was shot in the head, and an enemy bayonet was plunged into his lung.
20:54Miraculously, he survived.
20:57But to add to his troubles, he was still tormented by the memory of Alma.
21:06By now, she changed partners yet again, and moved on to a new lover, the man who would
21:12become her third husband, the poet and novelist Franz Werfel.
21:20Meanwhile, Kokoschka, still struggling to come to terms with the loss of his lover,
21:25devised a bizarre scheme.
21:28He commissioned a life-sized doll in the image of Alma.
21:33He thinks, well, if I can't have Alma, I'll have a doll of her, life-sized, and like Alma
21:39in every particular, except she's not living and breathing.
21:44And consequently, she can't answer back, and she can't deny him his pleasures.
21:51The woman asked to make the doll was Hermina Moos, and Kokoschka gave her detailed and
21:57explicit instructions on exactly how it should look.
22:03He wrote a series of really bizarre and endlessly detailed letters as to how he wanted this
22:11doll made, down to the teeth and the tongue and the, you know, the eyelashes and the...
22:18Every single thing.
22:21In one letter, Kokoschka demanded, please make it possible that my sense of touch would
22:28be able to take pleasure in those parts where the layers of fat and muscle suddenly give
22:33way to a sinuous covering of skin.
22:38Finally, Kokoschka's dream doll arrived.
22:44And he opens the box, and he takes out this figure, which horrifies him.
22:51And no wonder, because it looks like nothing so much as a yeti.
22:57This soft, swans-down-like fuzz on the skin, which obviously Alma Mahler had and which
23:05he loved so much, has now come out like thick polar bear's fur, is the only way I can describe
23:14it.
23:16But Kokoschka made the best of a bad job.
23:20He drew and painted the doll, and bought expensive dresses and Parisian lingerie for his make-believe
23:26Alma.
23:28It's even said that he took the doll to the opera, and to dinner afterwards.
23:38It's an appalling thing.
23:40It really is a bizarre thing.
23:42It might be a provocation, of course, on the one hand, because Kokoschka loved to shock
23:47people.
23:48So there is a good deal of provocation probably in it, but on the other hand, it shows deep
23:54wounds that still were there.
23:57Eventually, however, Kokoschka decided to end his bizarre relationship with the Alma
24:03doll.
24:04He threw a grand party and invited his friends to help him say goodbye.
24:12They weren't told that the doll was going to be there as the guest of honour, so to
24:18speak, but at the end of it all, at any rate, it was said to be a fairly noisy drunken party,
24:24the doll was summarily stabbed and thrown over the hedge at the end of the garden.
24:32In later life, Kokoschka recalled how the police, seeing what looked like the dead body
24:37of a naked woman, had assumed a crime of passion had been committed.
24:42As Kokoschka said, that's what it was, because on that night, I had killed Alma.
24:59While all these shenanigans were going on, the tempest was gracing the walls of Otto
25:03Winter's home in Hamburg.
25:06But in the 1920s, he sold the painting to the city's art gallery, and it might well
25:13have stayed there if the violent history of the 20th century had not intervened.
25:20When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, they set about seizing works of art that didn't
25:26conform to their ideals.
25:28One of them was the Tempest.
25:35This so-called degenerate art was shown in a huge exhibition that toured Germany in the
25:39late 1930s.
25:42But much as they mocked and made fun of what they considered rubbish, the Nazis were smart
25:46enough to realise that some of this art might find buyers outside Germany.
25:54The Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, noted in his diary,
25:58We hope at least to make some money from this garbage.
26:07One piece of garbage that was sure to make money was the Tempest, and the man who was
26:12determined to get his hands on it was the director of the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Georg
26:17Schmitt.
26:20As soon as he learned that Kokoschka's Tempest was for sale, it was very high on his list.
26:31Georg Schmitt received details from Berlin of the works of art for sale, but there were
26:35those who thought it was wrong to give good Swiss money to the Nazis.
26:41Schmitt was convinced, however, that it was his duty to get paintings like the Tempest
26:45for the museum in Basel.
26:49He knows there are fantastic masterpieces on sale that might even land somewhere where
26:57you can never see them again, some private collection that gets destroyed, or the Nazis
27:04themselves might burn them, like they had burned all the books in Berlin not long ago.
27:10He did the only right thing. He went for quality, and he convinced everybody to bring them to
27:18Basel.
27:25And so, for nearly 70 years, the Kunstmuseum in Basel has been home to the Tempest.
27:37The two young lovers in the Tempest both lived into ripe old age. Alma Mahler died in New
27:45York in 1964. She was 85 years old. In her apartment, a small reproduction of the Tempest
27:54stood on a side table.
28:00Oskar Kokoschka died in 1980, just a few weeks short of his 94th birthday. By then, he had
28:08established himself as one of the great, innovative artists of the 20th century.
28:15The story behind this painting is the story of one of the, dare I say, greatest love affairs,
28:24and most obviously doomed love affairs, in the recorded history of the 20th century.
28:37And there's another masterpiece on BBC4 tomorrow at half past seven.